the other side of now

Day 16. We’re over the hump now on our 30-day blogging challenge. There have been a couple of days when I felt really pressed for time and had no idea what to blog about. If I wasn’t involved in this challenge with my bros, @MrFresh and @SMVGeek, I would have let those days slip by without blogging.

The accountability to my blogging brothers keeps me motivated to blog even if I don’t particularly feel like it.

I fear that once the challenge is finished, it will be easy to slip into old habits of not blogging for flimsy reasons like the classic, “I don’t have time…” That’s why I love doing these challenges, because even if I don’t have time, I make time, or as the Merovingian says, “If you do not ever take time, how can you ever have time?”

I mentioned in a post a few days ago that I have a folder full of poems that I have been meaning to shape into another poetry collection. It’s been 13 years since I published my last collection.

For today’s post, I thought I’d share a few poems from the folder. These aren’t necessarily in their final form, but here you go…

Who are you?

She asked me the one question
I was afraid to answer. I’ve spent 
too much time constructing and
reconstructing this persona for her 
to come along and deconstruct me
with a single question.

She can sense my stories 
are only skin deep, polite,
easy on the ears, but light on the soul

I’m afraid to reveal myself
to myself, frightened because
I’m not sure what she or I might find

But she really wants to know

Who are you? She asks.
I duck and dive and sidestep
the question that’s on 
everybody’s mind

I hardly know myself
I fall to the ground.
I hand her my head on
a plate.

She burst into tears
laughing madly,
your name is all asked

Don’t be so dramatic.

thoughts

I gave her my thoughts
Until there was nothing
Left of my mind

Captain Hook

as i listen in silence
the tick tock of the clock
grows louder and louder

all i can think about
is how captain hook
freaked out every time
he heard a ticking clock

he knew death was near
but that didn’t stop
old hook from trying
to out sail his fate

or me mine.

reminisce

She reminisced in my name. Fire, meltdown
and the sanity they let loose in a tangled
abstract fantasy of post apocalyptic let down.

She reminisced in the attic for the wind,
the damned, and the free. Her shadow slipped
further. Soft she lay as the boys came for her body.

She looked to reach them in their sleep.
One by one they came inside her, cuddled 
her body like the walking dead carry sheep.

They wouldn’t reminisce in her beauty
took her dress for rags, her hair for 
loose strands of braided hopelessness.

She reminisced in the darkness. No longer
lonely, a mystic fastened like clockwork,
I never tried to see her face.

If you made this far, thanks for reading. And if you’re feeling frisky, then subscribe to the blog. It doesn’t cost you anything, but it makes me feel good.